Lap rouge

Already with his Film Academy films Kutzooi en Lap rouge, Lodewijk Crijns managed to rouse strong emotions. He consciously caused confusion by structuring these two films as documentaries, and gradually adding more and more improbable, absurdist elements. This makes him one of the directors who played with the eclectic fake documentary form in the mid-nineties. The central characters in his award-winning graduation film Lap rouge are two eccentric brothers, a butcher and a scrap dealer, who have been living in a southern French hamlet with their aged, tyrannical mother since 1959 because mother ‘couldn’t stand it anymore’. Crijns follows them in their daily activities (like preserving babies in formalin), but also has them react into the camera by interviewing them and asking their comments. Sometimes they are annoyed by the camera, then again they feel flattered or confide their secrets to it. In his occasionally bizarre, sometimes harrowing portrait, Crijns, who calls himself a master forger, does not shrink from melodrama and explores the boundaries of shameless peeping, before reality TV cropped up. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)